Elton Mayo

Hawthorne Studies, human relations

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) was an Australian-born psychologist who held a professorship at Harvard Business School. He directed the Hawthorne Studies at Western Electric's Chicago plant (1924–1932), demonstrating that attention, group norms, and workplace relationships influence output more than physical conditions alone — the basis of the 'Hawthorne Effect'. His books 'The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization' (1933) and 'The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization' (1945) established human relations as a distinct field of management thought.